The lean start up

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One of the most confusing and perhaps learnable terminology that I have learnt during this course is “Lean start up”. My personal association to “Lean” is efficient and low cost from previous courses. However as the article linked below suggests, it is about hypothesis driven development and much more iterative to reach results quickly. Thus instead of following a pre-defined and very thorough list of things to check off, you have an idea of something that might be good and you try to procuring a testable prototype as quickly as possible. Then you learn from that. I believe in several advantages to this:

  • Quick customer response
  • Realise major apparent flaws in your idea quickly
  • Motivates for future development
  • Low cash-intensity and thus lower risk
  • et.c.

This concept is something that I will take with me from this course in my future entrepreneurial endeavours.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lean-business-model-cultural-differences-short-cavid-nadirov?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like

Course ME2603 – learnings & takeaways

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Hi everyone,

I want to summarize the course through this blog post to complement the course evaluation we’ve filled in 🙂

I have decided to divide the review into the some of the given course components. I share my thoughts on each component and finishes by giving some tips to next years students! Overall this have been a great course, many elements that demands some time dedication but also gives lots of valuable experiences back.

Blogging: Interactive element to the course that I have considered the best way to discuss topics. Fun that everyone can contribute with research and analysis of each others findings. My greatest learning have been about networking since there have been valuable discussions on this topic. Also how to network in forums like this blog. It has also been a lot of fun to network with everyone and discuss entrepreneurship in class and at startup events.

Lectures: Interactive and fun! I think the best part is how many great guest speakers that have visited us. All of them have been of high quality and unique in its own sense. Great variation between early stage startups and different positions in companies and organisations. My greatest learning from this was actually Nordnet since that presentation gave concrete models to use for evaluating products. By putting it in to a context like the following you can break down the value for the customer in a structured way.

When situation, I can motivation, so I outcome

Twitter: Never used twitter before so learned a lot by having a twitter flow consisting of just entrepreneurial tweets from different sources. Saw lots of differences in what different organisations lift as important regarding entrepreneurship. It has a lot to do with the perspective on innovation; governmental, political, seed funding, startups, IPOs or the actual entrepreneur. Interesting to just follow these and I will definitely continue.

LinkedIn: Have used LinkedIn a lot before and thought it was a great source to get an overview of the activities in the different forums. Tip is to activate push notifications to get updates in real time.

Elevator pitch: Great opportunity to 1) test your idea, and 2) push your own ability to pitch. I learned more about how to prioritize what to tell when time is limited and therefore what aspects are most important to investors. This also made me think through my own projects and how to portray them. My greatest takeaway was the importance of finding the intriguing topic of the idea and keep to that to make sure interest from the listeners is kept and the speech is remembered.

Venture project: To take the venture idea to the next level. We are in the middle of this so won’t go so deep into this yet. Fun to work on the idea together. Get the feeling of starting a company and the questions you encounter together and need to approach. Have already realized the importance of doing significant analysis work with limited research material and finished product. One element that covers many interesting subjects is the Business Model Canvas. Even though this is just one of many ways to manage your business model it has been a huge help in understanding entrepreneurship. How to color-code the canvas is something I will take with me. I’ve learned the importance of structuring how different aspects in the business like revenue streams and cost structure are related to different customer groups. This is an importance aspect when evaluating your business and taking strategic decisions even if you don’t use the exact BMC.

Summing up this have been a fun course to take with a lot of interactive elements. The more time you put into it the more you get out of it. My greatest tip is to sum your work and thoughts on the blog to process it along the way.

Hope to see you all soon again 🙂

/Linda

 

Heping Start Ups – Operates 2

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Hi,

Since before the start of this course, me and Fredrik Nordström has been involved in a Start up by a couple of KTH students from our program. It began before the summer when we first heard the idea and had some heated discussions with the founders regarding the project and continued after the summer we where asked to operate two of the companies, which we said yes to.

The idea in short is to identify craftsmen markets where, above all, the communication between customer and contractor is undeveloped (websites that are unprofessional, no clear “hits” when searching the internet etc) and where it’s believed that new companies can enter and earn market shares.

So since the beginning of september we operate a company that suplies lands for your garden etc, called Gräsbolaget (that Fredrik has written about earlier) and a company which does drainage and earthwork, called Svenska Markspecialisten:)

We entered the companies in the middle of high season and much of the work up till now has been about making sure that the day to day operations work and that we can manage the customers we get. But now when the season are coming to its end (the frost bites hard soon), we are going to start focusing more on developing the strategies of the companies for the spring. This includes contacting future and existing partners (which we have talked about a lot in this course), talking with suppliers and figuring out price plans.

And we also would like your help!

If you have the time, please go to our websites (unfortunately everything is in Swedish since our market is Stockholm..) and give feedback on whats good and whats missing/can be improved:)

http://grasbolaget.se

http://svenskamarkspecialisten.se

Oh and one more thing! If you do a Google search and find the websites that way, don’t click on the ad-link because we are paying for every click and we want to save them for possible customers;)

Looking forward to your feedback/thoughts!

/ Emil

Helping Start-Up: Arctos

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The previous study year I worked with start-up company named Arctos brings nature close to people, by making it easy to find and book outdoor experiences. They’re building a platform that connects users to local partners, who offer experiences and activities such as hiking, camping and kayaking. You can use a local bus to go Nuuksio where Arctos performs. The main idea is to lower the first step to go to nature.

arc

So I made their survey and gave some feedback about their current situation. I advised them to expand to Sweden also and their main goal is to expand whole Scandinavia but before that they have to test the idea in Finland to see if it works well. I also advised them to increase their marketing so people will get know it and then start use the service. I really like the idea because it connect busy urban peoples and nature by lowering the cap between them.

Here some nice links:

http://arctosadventures.com

http://www.espooinnovationgarden.fi/en/espoo-innovation-garden/summer-of-startups-arctos-makes-it-easy-to-get-out-into-the-great-outdoors/

https://www.facebook.com/arctosadventures

STHML Tech Meet Up event 13rd October

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A week ago I joined with some of classmates at the STHML Tech Meet Up event. The event was totally crowded and air ventilation was not that good. The event was divided to two pieces, the first part was a overview of this month’s biggest investments in Stockholm start-ups. Some of those start-ups came to the stage to tell about their business and chatting with presenters. For me that part was quite boring because generally the presenters just chatted at the stage without any goal.

At the second part some investors came on to the stage and told something about themselves. After that started real pitching where some start-ups tried to convince the investors about their ideas or business opportunities. The first pitcher’s idea was to solve a refugee problems with a mobile application where they can communicate, get some activities and information. I personally liked the idea but I am a bit worried about how they can get enough income because that segment’s purchasing power is really low. After that, there was some other pitches which I can’t remember clearly because I didn’t find them enough interesting for me.

But I can clearly remember Gymgo’s pitch which didn’t go that well. Gymgo’s idea was to create universal gym membership which means that you can use any gym anywhere you want. After one minute presentation one of the investors said “PASS!” that was like a punch in the pither’s face. The investors commented the idea like usually people don’t want to use all gyms because they just pick the closest one. At the end of Gymgo presentation the pitcher presented that Gymgo covers other activities like hiking, skiing, climbing etc. So the investors started asking “Why the name is GymGO when it is not for gyms only?!”. That was a good point. I think the main idea of GymGo is good but I assume that the prize for customers will be really high, it will be really hard to get all gyms and other activity providers into it and also people really rarely need worldwide gym or activity membership. If you have money for travelling around the world you have money for a random gym visit in a random place, and maybe it is also cheaper.

IMG_0522IMG_0522

After GymGo it was Zeifie pitcher’s turn. Zeifie is a security app or device which you can use when someone following you and you are afraid to be robbed or raped. I liked idea and also investors generally liked it. One of the last pitches was a random guy from the audience who wanted to tell his idea. The idea was that everyone can be an advertiser so you can post advertisements to your facebook, twitter, linkedIn or other social networks. So he explained his idea like that “if you have 300 friends and you post one advertisement to your facebook, you can get like 2-3 euros from advertisers if you can reach those peoples.” The investors and my opinion is that the idea might work once but when some of my friends start to spamming my facebook with advertisements, I will block or remove him/her. And that idea will probably lead for whole facebook or twitter being just full of advertisements because all just keeps spamming them so idea can’t work like that. I also think that advertisers outcome will be bigger than income. The guy who presented the idea was totally convinced about his idea and he couldn’t understand why people didn’t like his idea.

Useful things about the course for me

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  1. Business Model Canvas and innovation

BMC was useful because it gives you good visual overview about your business and how the different blocks affecting to whole BMC and to other blocks. One important thing in BMC is that you should use different colours for different customer segments so BMC is clear and easy to read. BMC is a useful tool so I think I will use it in the future.

business-model-canvas-101-27-638

Picture 1. Gillette’s BMC.

Sometimes people think that an invention means an innovation which is not true. “An invention is a novel idea and innovation is the commercialization of that novel idea.” Creating a successful invention can be a lot harder and might requires a lot of money so that is one reason why big companies like Apple can create strong long lasting innovations. There are four types of innovations: technology, process, product/service and business model innovation. For me the most eye opening innovations were product/service and business model innovation because just changing those a little bit it might affect to your business income a lot. For example the right business model can be the main reason for the success, one good example about that is Spotify whose business model is totally different comparing to iTunes’ and that is their main reason for success.

  1. Approaches to Product Ideas

I liked this part because the way how you think is usually quite limited so getting better ideas you have to break the old chains. You should think really carefully what you really need and not need or how you can make your product more interesting for your customers. Variation of product attributes or functions is divided to 5 categories:

  1. Subtraction: Remove a key element.
  2. Multiplication: Copy a key element.
  3. Division: Dividing a product into components.
  4. Task unification: assign new task to exiting elements.
  5. Attribute dependency change: create new dependencies or break old ones.

Nophone was a good example about subtraction but the whole idea behind that is just a joke so is it really anymore subtraction when you remove almost all key elements? Like my friend said “I just created NoNophone which volume and weight is zero, and you can summon it by just using your imagination”. The example about camels and task unification was great because a camel is a lot more than just a carrier. Also the example about sprinklers and removing dependencies were really useful.

  1. Start Up Finance & Venture Capital

For me this part of the course was maybe the most important because getting an invention and if you want to rise it to innovation level or just get started you will need funding. Three the most common way to get funding are 3Fs & Bootstrapping, Debt financing and Equity financing. Understanding these financing opinions advantages and disadvantages generally helps you think which kind funding is good for your company. Very important part of equity financing was to know differences between angel investors and venture capital investors also when to use them, how they might affect, advantages and disadvantages.